Literature & Fiction, Women, Canada, Manners and customs, Short Stories, Canadian, Women--Psychology, Canadian literature 

"In eight new stories, a master of the form extends and magnifies her great themes - the vagaries of love, the passion that leads down unexpected paths, the chaos hovering just under the surface of things, and the strange, often comical desires of the human heart." "Time stretches out in some of the stories: a man and a woman look back forty years to the summer they met - the summer, as it turns out, that the true nature of their lives was revealed. In others time is telescoped: a young girl finds in the course of an evening that the mother she adores, and whose fluttery sexuality she hopes to emulate, will not sustain her - she must count on herself." "Some choices are made - in a will, in a decision to leave home - with irrevocable and surprising consequences. At other times disaster is courted or barely skirted; when a mother has a startling dream about her baby; when a woman, driving her grandchildren to visit the lakeside haunts of her youth, starts a game that could have dangerous consequences."--Jacket.  

Publisher Comments
All of these eight wonderful stories are about what people will do for love, and the unexpected routes their passion will force them to take.
An old landlady in Vancouver who alarms the just-married narrator with her prim advice about married life - and “the peculiar threat” of a china cabinet that must be washed once a month - is shown to have conspired when young in a crime of passion. A young mother, at the mercy of the “radiant explosion” that comes when she thinks of her secret life, abandons her baby and four-year old to be with her lover in the story “The Children Stay.” A gruff old country doctor in the 1960s is discovered by his daughter to be helping desperate women, his “special patients.” An impetuous young woman meets a visiting Indian student and conceives on a train from Vancouver to Toronto because of “the fact that you couldnt get condoms around the Calgary station, not for love or money.” An Ontario farm wifes affair drives her husband to commit a murder; its discovery, years later, will act as a negotiating point for a new, presumably satisfactory, marriage.

The book is clear-eyed about the imperfections of marriage, the clutter of our emotional lives, and the impermanence of love: “Not that that was the end. For we did make up. But we didnt forgive each other.” Even the shared memories of earlier times prove to be a minefield, and many of the stories track the changes that time brings over generations to families, lovers, and even to friends who share old, intimate secrets about “the prostration of love.”

As always these stories by Alice Munro are shot through with humour, and are as rich as novels. As always the characters in the stories are easily, sometimes uncomfortably, recognizable as people like us. One quote summarizes the delightful surprises that await the reader: “Did you ever think that peoples lives could be like that and end up like this? Well, they can.”

About the Author
Alice Munros fame abroad is matched by the admiration she enjoys in Canada, where she has won the Governor Generals Award three times. Awards for her past collections include the W.H. Smith Prize in the U.K.; the National Book Circle Critics Award in the U.S.; the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction; the Rea Award for the Short Story; the Giller Prize, the Trillium Prize and the Libris Award. She lives in Ontario and British Columbia. 

Genre/Form: Short stories
Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Alice Munro

ISBN: 0771066856 9780771066856
OCLC Number: 39386508
Notes: "A Douglas Gibson book."
Description: 339 pages ; 24 cm
Contents: Love of a good woman --
Jakarta --
Cortes Island --
Save the reaper --
Children stay --
Rich as stink --Before the change --
My mother's dream.
Responsibility: by Alice Munro.